Sex, lies and the art of writing honest memoirs

When a celebrated psychoanalyst declares to a packed gathering that facts are the least important part of writing a memoir, the audience sits up in rapt attention tempered with disbelief. "What actually happened is not important-what you believe happened is," said Sudhir Kakar, replying to an audience question on Day One of the Times of India Literary Carnival on Friday.

If memoir-writing was about the subjective recollection of life events for Kakar, for Fatima Bhutto, granddaughter of former Pakistan prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, it was about the necessity to urgently record events as they happened. "We have this amazing ability to erase our immediate past," she said about her country. With some candid revelations peppering the discussion between the three memoir writers-Kakar , Bhutto and historian Zareer Masani-and moderator Patrick French, the postlunch session audience didn't need any caffeine kick to stayawake and fully attentive.

When the debate swung to the topic of honesty, the session saw a bit of cross-fire . Referring to Fatima's soft approach to the controversial parts of her grandfather's life, Masani said, "Unlike Fatima, I need to be honest, brutally honest." (To which she immediately riposted "That's unfair!") But it was Kakar-whose memoir according to French is "very frank by subcontinent standards" -who was the most honest, even at the session. The psychoanalyst had the audience in splits with anecdotes of his time spent in Germany as a wide-eyed , 20-year-old and his six-week-long sea journey from Calcutta to Hamburg where he found himself ogling "young women's legs" . Kakar's brutally honest confessions did not stop there-he went on to narrate the troubles he faced when he danced for the first time with a woman, a German woman: "I had to tie a handkerchief when dancing . I won't say where."

Despite the outpouring of candidness and claims of brutal honesty from Kakar and Masani, they did not contradict Fatima's contention that a memoir was never a tell-all . "There is a strong sense of private-public space. Anyone who has written a memoir will say that they always keep some things to themselves," she said. Kakar had an interesting angle to add to the debate. "The problem with memoirwriting is the voyeuristic pleasure that a reader looks for," he said. "Readers want to know about the writer and do not pay much attention to the writing ." Ergo: "In fiction-writing, you want to convince people. In memoirs, you want to seduce people and so memoir-writing is on the seduction side."

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Sex-lies-and-the-art-of-writing-honest-memoirs/articleshow/10965692.cms